Space-Age Garages That Save Space

By ANTOINETTE MARTIN

Published: September 21, 2003

Correction Appended

IT lumbered and thudded into existence -- three years late, some still-debated but hefty amount over budget -- but the Hoboken municipal parking garage that opened its robotically controlled doors last year displays a stunning agility. It lifts and carries cars about on computer-controlled steel pallets as if they were delicate ballerinas, moving with precision and speed inside a structure that is remarkably compact.

While performance tests are still going on, the garage is limited to operating at two-thirds of its full capacity. When all systems are go, however, it will park 324 cars on just a 100-by-100-foot lot. The seven-level garage is 56 feet high, not much higher than the four-story row houses that are its neighbors.

''This is amazingly proficient use of space,'' commented Darius Sollohub, a New Jersey Institute of Technology professor who studies parking and urban land use. ''It may provide one of the solutions to the most important conflict in urban design: where do you put all the cars in environments where car volume is high and space is at a premium?''

Although an automated garage is more expensive to build it typically takes only about half as much precious real estate as a conventional ramped garage to handle the same number of cars, or even more. That is why in European and Asian cities, the automatic garage was long ago anointed as the best solution, Mr. Sollohub said.

The Hoboken structure, designed by Gerhard Haag, an engineer and architect born in Germany, where ramped garages are rare and automatic garages common, is a first-of-its-kind in the United States. There are other automated garages in the country, some dating from the 1950's. But the Hoboken garage -- and another smaller one designed by a different company in a Washington apartment building -- belong to a new generation of fully automated garages that parking industry specialists say is generating new interest. Indeed, Mr. Haag said, there are 67 American cities, including Manhattan, where his company is currently discussing proposals.

Hoboken's Garden Street Garage is completely computerized, with two identical elevator systems that are able to move simultaneously in both vertical and horizontal directions and communicate with each other by wireless transmitters. The garage's computer figures out which of the hundreds of spaces in the building a vehicle should occupy, and then delivers it there untouched by human hands.

A monthly parker pulls into one of four driveways at the red-brick building on Garden Street, which on the outside looks pretty much like a group of Hoboken row houses. The driver powers the car forward a few yards onto a steel pallet, maneuvering the wheels between guardrails as instructions appear on an L.E.D. signboard about correct alignment, then turns off the engine and gets out.

After locking the car, the parker swipes a card in front of a magnetic reader, and while the sign on the wall is flashing a reminder to step back, automatic elevator doors close around the car and it is whisked to a computer-assigned slot.

The computer factors in the vehicle's size when making an assignment, putting larger S.U.V.'s on lower levels. It also takes into account the driver's schedule on previous visits, putting vehicles whose owners enter and exit frequently in the slots that the system can most easily access.

When the owner returns for the car and swipes the card again, the process begins in reverse. Within seconds, another electronic sign announces at which bay the car will appear, still on the pallet where the parker placed it. In its first year of operation, according to the computer records, the average wait to retrieve a car was 2.5 minutes.

THE key breakthrough with his type of design, according to Mr. Haag, is that the mechanized system is ''truly redundant.'' With older automated designs, said Mr. Haag, all three movements a car elevator can make -- in and out, up and down, side to side -- are powered by one central unit. If any single part fails, the garage becomes inoperable.

Mr. Haag's patented design has dual systems, so that its two elevators can move separately and independently, and the three types of movements they make are each powered by separate motors. Furthermore, each individual motor has a backup. There are twin motors powering the rollers under the pallets, for example, each working at less than half capacity and programmed to take over if the other should fail.

Besides increasing reliability, notes Dale F. Denda of PMRC, a national parking market research company, the fully automatic garage means ''throughput'' is enhanced -- parking lingo for shortening the time it takes to store cars and retrieve them.

The one other fully automatic garage in the United States is set beneath the Summit Grand Parc, an apartment building two blocks from the White House in Washington that incorporates both a new apartment tower and historic structure that was once home to the United Mineworkers. Designed by the Spacesaver Parking Company, a division of the Mid-American Elevator Company, and using equipment manufactured by a German concern, Wohr, the garage parks just 74 cars, and has only one automated elevator system.

Correction: October 5, 2003, Sunday An article on Sept. 21 about garages in which cars are parked by automated equipment misstated the type of street parking available near the robotic facility in Hoboken. One side of the street is reserved for residents with permits; on the other side parking is allowed for up to four hours. There are no parking meters on the street.